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Monday, August 29, 2011

Bonds of hope and hardship

Ben Doherty and Kate Geraghty
August 20, 2011

Fearful ... Mohammad Akbar Sohrabi, fourth from left, with members of his extended family in their rented home where he remains largely in hiding. Photo: Kate Geraghty

A decade after their disastrous voyage, the Tampa asylum seekers sent back to Afghanistan are still on the run. Story by Ben Doherty. Photos by Kate Geraghty.
Sarwar had been home a week when they came for him. After more than two years away from Afghanistan - on leaky boats and in refugee camps, seeking a new country to call home - he returned to his village in Ghazni province.
"He was at his home for one week when some men, some Taliban, came on motorbikes. They took him from his house and they killed him. They dragged him outside and choked him to death with barbed wire.
"His wife and children saw him killed. They fled. I don't know where they are now," Mohammad Akbar Sohrabi says.

Sohrabi carries a photo of Sarwar. It's mixed up among the meagre possessions he has from his time overseas, alongside a flimsy passport with an incorrect birth date and a Nauru stamp in it.
The shopkeeper and the metalworker were firm friends at Topside, the Australian-run refugee camp on Nauru. The photograph shows them in happy times, seated, making preparations for one of the occasional parties the detainees held. Then, they believed they would be resettled in Australia.
Eventually though, pressured to return to Afghanistan, they flew home together, "but we faced the same problems, the same people, waiting for us".

It was Sohrabi who warned his friend not to go home, that his village wasn't safe. "But he went, and he died. He was innocent, he was a very decent man. God willing," Sohrabi says, "I am still alive."
But he remains in hiding.
Over the course of the seemingly endless warring of his Afghan lifetime, Sohrabi has lost three family members to insurgent attacks. He lives in fear he will be next.
He rarely leaves his home, except to work, and worries for his children who run serious risks simply by walking to school every day.
IN THE eyes of the Taliban, the sins of Rauf* are legion.
He is Hazara, an ethnicity regarded as un-Afghan, barely human, by the Pashtun militants. He is a Christian, an abomination in Islamic fundamentalist eyes, and a left-wing political activist. But his greatest crime, perhaps, was teaching girls to read.
Rauf can no longer live in Afghanistan and is in hiding in a South Asian country. His family cannot contact him and the friends who once sheltered him have told him it is no longer safe for him to stay.
Sitting in a secure room in a foreign city far from his homeland, Rauf remains wary; he faces the door as we speak and asks that the curtains be closed.
He describes an isolation that has enveloped his entire existence: "I see only one friend. Always, always I am very lonely."
After being returned to Afghanistan from Nauru in 2003, he moved back to his village in the Jaghori Valley in the central province of Ghazni.
The schools there had been ruined, the buildings robbed of books and stationery, the teachers chased out of town.
Rauf had taught English to other asylum seekers in detention on Nauru so, using what little money his family could gather, and funds from international donors, he set up literacy centres in some of the poorest communities in Afghanistan.
In one village in Uruzgan, where not a single woman or girl could read, he started teaching girls in a tent-cum-school. "On the third day, the Taliban attacked," he says, his voice faltering.
"It was just becoming dark, they had come there by motorbikes … [and] everything they took, the stationery, the books, they burned the tents. They destroyed everything."
Other schools survived longer. From one centre in Qarabagh, 34 women were able to graduate a basic literacy course.
But last year, he was kidnapped, bundled into a car, blindfolded and beaten for five days before he was released, threatened that unless he paid off his captors they would come back and kill him.
Since then, he has been on the run, moving between houses, between cities and countries.
"I cannot return. They will come for me again, and they can do anything. No one can stop [them]. They will kill me."
A decade after his first attempt to reach Australia failed, Rauf is trying again. Now recognised by the UNHCR as a refugee, he is in the process of applying for a protection visa, having been denied one last year.
"I want to go legally. To Australia I hope, but anywhere, and I hope soon, because I cannot live like this."
SARWAR and Rauf were just two of the 433 asylum seekers, mostly ethnic Hazara from Afghanistan, who boarded the undersized and ill-prepared Palapa in Jakarta on August 23, 2001.
Barely 24 hours later, the engine failed and the stricken boat began to take on water before those on board were picked up by the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa and carried to Australian waters. So began a dramatic chain of events that would eventually see 179 of the asylum seekers sent back to Afghanistan. (See story, page 6.)
A decade on from the Tampa, the Herald has spent six months tracking Tampa returnees who had been sent back to Afghanistan from Nauru.
The group, bound together by two years in detention on the remote and isolated island of Nauru, has become a splintered diaspora.
Few keep in contact. Few can. Rumours of what has happened to others sweep across the scattered group through chance meetings and common contacts.
Many Tampa returnees have simply disappeared: walked to work one day and never come back. Others have fled again, to Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, on to Europe or back to Australia. Some - it has been reported as many as 20 - have been killed by the Taliban in their homes and villages. And some have died trying to escape again.
There is no archetype of a Tampa returnee's story. But common threads run through many. Financial hardship, near ruin, is one.
While some Tampa asylum seekers were poor, seeking economic opportunity as well as safety, many on board were people of means. Several whom the Herald met were business owners in the days before the Taliban.
They sold everything they owned - businesses, stock, homes and cars - to finance their shot at getting to Australia. And despite Afghanistan's shaky wartime economy, some have since managed to rebuild lives of relative prosperity. But most now eke out an existence on Afghanistan's crowded margins.
Mohammad Zahir Rasouli sold his farmland, his house and his partnership in a car to finance his trip to Australia. Still it wasn't enough for the people smugglers, so he borrowed heavily. A decade later, he is mired in debt.
"After all these years, I haven't paid them back. They are friends, so they never ask, but I am still in debt and I can't pay it back," Rasouli says.
He now works as a shop assistant in a grocery store, trying to feed his own family - his wife and three sons - as well as two nephews, the children of his brother who was killed by the Taliban.
"I work here as a shop assistant and I can only earn [enough to] take care of the food. What I earn, that much we eat."
Separation from family is another recurring theme.
Shir Ahmad Ahmadi's eldest child was kidnapped when the family's political enemies came to his house looking for him. He paid a large bribe to have his 19-year-old son released and then told him to flee. He does not expect ever to see him again.
"I said to him: 'you must run now … don't come back, because you know what happens to people here'."
Mohammad Naim Akbari's wife and seven children live in his home village in Jaghori.
He sends them money when he can, from wherever he is, occasionally as close as a couple of hundred kilometres.
"I have seen my family only twice in the last five years. They are in my home, but I cannot go to my village, it is not safe for me there. The Taliban will kill me.
"I personally think I have been in hell, not on earth, but I was forced to. What can I do?"
Finally, the element that appears common to almost all the Tampa returnees' stories - wherever the past decade has taken them - is the fear they are not yet safe.
They have lost family members, seen fellow asylum seekers killed. They have been kidnapped, beaten and robbed, been frozen out of jobs and reduced to begging. They have faced death threats and had their homes razed.
The salient story of Mohammad Hussain Mirzaee, told time and again to the Herald across south and central Asia, seems to haunt many of the returnees.
In 2008, Mirzaee, a Tampa returnee and a former anti-Taliban fighter, was caught by insurgents and dragged to his home village. There, in front of 35 members of his family, he was beaten and thrown down a well.
His tormentors threw a hand grenade down after him, decapitating him.
Naim Akbari was his friend.
"We all worry, because who is next? This is the ending story of all of us."
*Not his real name.